Biography:Mirella Lapata
Mirella Lapata FRSE | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | |
| Awards | Karen Spärck Jones Award (2009) ACL Fellow (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
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| Institutions | University of Edinburgh University of Sheffield |
| Thesis | Acquisition and modelling of lexical knowledge: a corpus-based investigation of systematic polysemy (2000) |
| Doctoral advisors | |
| Website | homepages |
Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.[3] Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP).[1]
Education
Lapata obtained a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.[4] Lapata's doctoral research investigated the acquisition of information from polysemous linguistic units using probabilistic methods supervised by Alex Lascarides, Chris Brew and Steve Finch.[2]
Career and research
After her doctorate, Lapata assumed academic positions at Saarland University and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.[4][5] At the University of Edinburgh she became a reader in the School of Informatics where she is a full Professor and holds a personal chair in natural language processing.[6] Lapata is a member of the Human Communication Research Center and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, both in Edinburgh.[7]
Between 2015 and 2017, Lapata served as a member of the Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group.[8] Recently[when?] Lapata was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth €1.9M to fund five years of her project, TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text.[9]
Awards and honours
- In 2009 Lapata became the first recipient of the Microsoft British Computer Society (BCS)/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award.[10] The award recognises achievement in furthering the progress in information retrieval and natural language processing; the award commemorates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones.
- In 2012 Lapata won an Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-CoNLL 2012 Best Reviewer Award.[11]
- In 2018 Lapata was awarded, alongside Li Dong, an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Best Paper Honorable Mention.[12]
- In 2019 Lapata was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh[13]
- In 2020 Lapata was elected to the Academia Europaea.[14]
- In 2025 Lapata was awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal for Computing Research.[15]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Lapata, Maria (2000). The acquisition and modelling of lexical knowledge : a corpus-based investigation of systematic polysemy (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/22394. OCLC 1063499316. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.653681.
- ↑ "people" (in en-US). University of Edinburgh. http://edinburghnlp.inf.ed.ac.uk/index.php/people/.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Stadium Speaker". http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/aboutspeaker.php?s=31&theSpeakerid=721.
- ↑ "Image and Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval". https://irsg.bcs.org/ksjaward/topic_models.pdf.
- ↑ Anon. "Mirella Lapata". University of Edinburgh. https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Maria_Lapata.html.
- ↑ Mitchell, Jeff; Lapata, Mirella (2010). "Composition in Distributional Models of Semantics". Cognitive Science 34 (8): 1388–1429. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01106.x. ISSN 0364-0213. PMID 21564253.
- ↑ "Mirella Lapata" (in en-gb). Royal Society. https://royalsociety.org/people/mirella-lapata-12767/.
- ↑ "TransModal success" (in en). The University of Edinburgh. https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/news-events/stories/2016/transmodal-success.
- ↑ "KSJ Award". https://irsg.bcs.org/ksjaward.php.
- ↑ "EMNLP-CoNLL 2012 – Best reviewers". http://emnlp-conll2012.unige.ch/best-reviewers.html.
- ↑ "ACL 2018: Best Paper Honourable Mentions". https://acl2018.org/2018/07/26/hon-mention-papers/.
- ↑ "Fellows" (in en-GB). 21 June 2016. https://www.rse.org.uk/fellows/.
- ↑ "Mirella Lapata". Member profiles. Academia Europaea. https://www.ae-info.org/ae/User/Lapata_Mirella.
- ↑ "BCS Announces 2025 Lovelace Medal winners". BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. 2025-09-23. https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/bcs-announces-2025-lovelace-medal-winners/.
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